Author Archive

A Miscellany of New Words

I continue to assiduously note new words I encounter, not unlike a wee gnome giddily gathering charms from the floor of a wizard’s workshop. New spells for my sachet of incantations!

From the NYT:

Zhuzh [up]: to spice up, figuratively; to add some extra oomph to something. A spoiler for the NYT mini crossword from March 13, 2024. For a full story about the word, see this Times article from a few years prior.
Uxorious: Doting to the point of subservience in marital matters. From another NYT article.

From chapters by various authors in Field Notes on Science and Nature, edited by Michael Canfield:

Taphonomy: the study of the process of decay and fossilization, or that process itself.
Chador: a garment; used figuratively, as I recall, to describe something similarly veiled.
Gentes; plural of gens: a clan or group of related individuals; specially, a subset of a [brood] parasite population that associates with a particular host.

From Orbital, by Samantha Harvey:

Birling: logrolling. Here, the similarly centered motion of rotating planets and orbiting bodies.
Scarper: to flee or escape.
Tranche: a portion or slice (perhaps specifically financial).

Miscellaneous:

Feculent: foul. From Jamie Ford’s Esperanto in A People’s Future of the United States, edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams.
Mojibake: gibberish that appears when text is rendered with the wrong character encoding. Learned the term while attempting to diagnose a misbehaving web browser.

Posted on Tuesday, April 2nd, 2024.

Mr. Rogers Portrait Print

My printmaking effort for March is this portrait of Fred Rogers. The Patreon supporter edition will go in the mail next week.

Posted on Saturday, March 30th, 2024.

Flaco Prints

My patron print for February 2024 is this Eurasian Eagle-Owl, loosely inspired by the story of Flaco. I’m catching up on art projects: the patron edition of these “February” prints just went in the mail yesterday, but as usual, there are a couple extras floating around ready to go to any new members. (Also available in sticker form.)

Posted on Sunday, March 10th, 2024.

New Word Alert – Gormenghast #1

First, two cultural terms:

Pagris: turbans, specifically those used in India
Sawm: fasting, as one of the five pillars of Islam

A printmaking term:

Quoin: an expanding device used to lock letterpress type in place. (Also a masonry term for cornerstones or keystones.)

Last but not least, a big batch of words from the beginning of Titus Groan, book one of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy. I’ve had the omnibus for some time but just started reading it. It’s delightfully strange and surprisingly funny — and definitely rife with unfamiliar vocabulary.

Cantonment: a military base or barracks.
Recrudescent: like an outbreak, or reopening of wounds.
Propinquintel or propinquity: proximity, especially as it pertains to relationships; kinship.
Calid: hot! Hace calor.
Rissole: a breaded delicacy.
Pullulation: sprouting or proliferating; in context, teeming.
Hayrick: aka a haystack.
Spilth: that which hath been spilled.
Rabous: new word alert, or not-a-word alert? Possibly a typo for rufous (or, less likely, raucous).

Posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2024.

Newly Queued – Short Story Collections

Here are three short story collections I recently picked up:

The Fantasy Hall of Fame, edited by Robert Silverberg, from the local Friends of the Library book shop.
Collected Stories Vol. 1, by Richard Matheson, from a thrift store
A People’s Future of the United States, edited by Victor LaValle & John Joseph Adams, from Autumn Leaves Books.

Posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2024.

Tiger Cat Mats

You can now get my tiger print from last year printed as a “pet mat” from Redbubble. I’m not sure what it looks like in reality (the image about is an automatic product composition generated by Redbubble), but the option amuses me so I enabled the product in my sticker store.

Posted on Sunday, January 28th, 2024.

New Word Alert

Some new-to-me words from some recent reads:

Burin, an engraving tool. From Art Spiegelman’s introduction to the beautiful boxed set of Lynd Ward woodcut novels.

The casuarina and manchineel, invasive and native trees, respectively, to the Caribbean. Via Broken From the Colony, by Ada M. Patterson.
Paling, a spiky fencepost or a fence comprised of them, such as a palisade. Same source as above.
Cathect, to invest with emotion. Same source.

Comity, a state of harmonious interaction, especially of a polity. From John Clute’s SFE entry on the late Terry Bisson.
Apothegm (or apophthegm), an aphorism. From Clute’s definition of equipoise in genre.
Vade mecum, Latin for a guidebook or other everyday carry item. From the entry on China Miéville.

Etiolate, to become pale from lack of light. Via The Bad Graft by Karen Russell in BASFF 2015.

Posted on Saturday, January 13th, 2024.

2023 Art Highlights

Cross-posting from Patreon (which you can join to follow for free): here are some highlights from last year’s patron-supported art projects.

Relief prints:

Spooky Sharpie sketches from #inktober 2023 (#10):

I drew a lot of author portraits last year. Here are a few of my favorite sketches:

Numbers in parentheses indicate the issue of my PORTRAITS zine in which the piece originally appeared.

Posted on Monday, January 8th, 2024.

SSL/TLS Certificates

One more website update: after a brief lapse, SSL/TLS certificates for anoved.net (this site) and jimdevona.art (my art portfolio/link page) are renewed. No longer will your web browser warn you about hanging out here.

My homebrew website recipe:

Domains via Hover.
Hosting via Laughing Squid.
Certificates via Servertastic.

Posted on Monday, January 8th, 2024.

Stylesheet Fixes

The stylesheets on the front page of anoved.net were not loading correctly except in the browser I used to log in to WordPress. For some reason, the WP Super Cache plugin was serving the index page with http stylesheet links even though https is used throughout the site template, yielding a mixed-content error. I disabled a few caching features and it seems to be resolved.

Posted on Thursday, January 4th, 2024.